Widespread use of Information Technology (IT) has led to a great change in business enterprise processes. Commercial transactions, such as purchases and sales, as well as business processes are performed in an electronic manner. This has resulted in business flow innovations, changes in methods and content of transactions, and changes in enterprise activities including communication with customers.
This change had been led by a shift from use of paper documents to use of electronic documents. By producing numerous documents in an electronic form or by producing numerous documents in a paper form and then converting the same to electronic form for use in business through, for example, electronic payment systems, electronic document management systems, electronic document exchange systems, and the like, process innovations with an aim of becoming ‘paperless’ are realized.
Current uses of documents include three types: use of paper documents, use of electronic documents, and use of both paper and electronic documents.
First, paper documents are produced and distributed in a paper form and are ordinarily used by most people. The use of paper documents allows for easy verification of forgeries and falsifications but is costly in terms of retrieval, distribution and storage of the documents.
Recently, electronic documents have been widely used, distributed and stored by electronic payment systems, document management systems, and the like, of businesses. The use of the electronic documents can reduce retrieval and storage cost and can realize rapid business processing, but such electronic documents can be easily forged, falsified and copied. In addition, the use of the electronic documents is affected by storage medium types.
The use of both paper documents and electronic documents may be found, for example, when contracts are written at a bank, with a paper document produced and scanned to obtain an electronic document. This use is intended to solve shortcomings of the use of paper documents or electronic documents solely, but increases storage cost due to dual storage.
Accordingly, there is a need for a scheme capable of solving the aforementioned problems and allowing for efficient use of electronic documents. In particular, there is a need for an electronic document repository system capable of guaranteeing authenticity of electronic documents stored therein through reinforced security, and guaranteeing reliable distribution of the electronic documents between enterprises or individuals by issuing an authenticity certificate.